Computing for the visually impaired.

There are quite a few people doing computing who are heavily visually impaired and or even blind. Know of many system administrators both male and female who earn their livelihood and are blind. Traditionally, special sound equipment had to be added to a computer so that all commands and or keystrokes would be spoken via a speech synthesizer. Now with newer systems that is not so much true. Linux has several distros that are free as in beer that were developed for the visually impaired. Knoppix, which has been around a long time was probably the first distro I know of to support visually impaired users. You can get it using wget or going to the url of:

ftp://ftp.cise.ufl.edu/pub/mirrors/knoppix/KNOPPIX-ADRIANE_V6.2CD-2009-11-18-EN.iso

Another distro is also available too:

Vinix (based on ubuntu)

http://vinuxproject.org/downloads



Advanced users can try:

 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux_for_the_blind

There is also software that can be added to existing linux systems to make accessibility easier:
brltty - Access software for a blind person using a braille display
brltty-x11 - Access software for a blind person using a braille display
texlive-latex-extra - TeX Live: LaTeX supplementary packages
brltty-flite - Access software for a blind person using a braille display
brltty-speechd - Access software for a blind person using a braille display
libcolorblind-dev - Pixel Filter for colorblind accessibility - headers
libcolorblind0 - Pixel Filter for colorblind accessibility
speechd-el - Emacs speech client using Speech Dispatcher
speechd-el-doc-cs - speechd-el documentation in Czech
squareness - suite of skins for different applications
ttf-tiresias - Fonts for the visually impaired

Interview from the Linux Link Tech show:
http://tlltsarchive.org/archives/tllts_433-12-14-11.mp3
No one should be kept from computing. Hope this article helps someone.

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